


You may have my number, you can take my name

by lc2l



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alcohol, Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-04
Updated: 2012-11-04
Packaged: 2017-11-18 00:04:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/554692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lc2l/pseuds/lc2l
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eve's hands are shaking and her mascara is smudged down her cheek and for a moment Q thinks Bond has died, but she wasn't this messed up when she killed him before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You may have my number, you can take my name

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [Bloo](http://bloovanmeer.livejournal.com) for the beta and [Paperclipbitch](http://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch) for reading it and encouraging/enabling me. 
> 
> Title is from Skyfall by Adele.
> 
> This is set after the movie so deals with the fallout from the ending and therefore has all the spoilers.

Really, Q accidentally bringing down MI6's security by hacking open the malicious code isn't a surprise. Getting into trouble through coding is pretty much his raison d'être.

He's sitting in the back of the basement where they put him with vague instructions to not run away before they can decide whether to charge him with something, thinking that they probably won't because they must have been expecting something like this. After all he was hired when M picked him up from a Government holding cell after he hacked the Secret Service's most secret files from a computer which turned out to be bugged. 

(He'd been sitting there wondering how best to explain that he'd been really _stupidly_ drunk and any other time he'd have noticed the bug and also wondering why saving his pride was apparently more important to him than a prison sentence. She had come in, looked him up and down in that way she does which somehow analyses you right down to the core, then asked how he was at car repair. He wasn't sure he'd ever so much as opened a bonnet in his life but he operates on the principle of 'take the job first, figure out how to do it later' and it's gone pretty well so far.)

But the point is that he has enough history that M can't possibly expect better from him so he's confident that he'll get out of all of this unscathed and will be able to go back to buying illegal substances from eBay and charging them to the UK Government.

He's sketching schematics in biro on the back of his hand for a tube of lipstick that is secretly a pen that is secretly a laser pointer and wondering what it would take to convince 007 to take it into the field (maybe if it fired something...) when the door opens. He turns, expecting to see Tanner telling him to get back to his desk and stop slacking off.

It's Eve. Her hands are shaking and her mascara is smudged down her cheek and he isn't the best at reading people but even he can figure this one out. His mind runs though everyone who might be in danger. Bond, but she wasn't this bad when she killed him before. Mallory, who turned out to be not as bad as he could've been. Any number of runners, guards, that boy in Conventional Weapons who shares his lunch with Eve while simultaneously sending Flirty Eyebrow Looks at Q's desk.

"M is dead," Eve says, bringing his mental Rolodex of faces and half-remembered names to an abrupt halt. "They need you upstairs."

The room is completely silent, isolated from the facility and the street hundreds of meters up. Even without all that, he has perfect hearing and her words are always perfectly formed. There is no possible way he misheard her except for how he must have done.

"What?"

She swallows, shakes her head and doesn't repeat herself. "They need you to hack the agency files," she says, in a voice barely above a whisper but still painfully audible in the small room. "Mallory wants to hold the funeral as soon as possible and -" her breath hitches. "They need a name for the headstone."

They need a name. He thinks back to that woman who walked into a grey walled cell and hired him when the jumped up suits wanted him hung for treason. The woman who managed everything and everyone, made the calls no one else would and didn't believe in backing down.

They don't even know her name. He has a box of business cards in a desk that got misplaced somewhere in the move and they all say 'Q'. His second week on the job, he tried hunting down his old life and found nothing. Not a trace.

If he can't find it, it doesn't exist. He tells himself that she was from another time, that there must be records – even _paper_ ones. And then there's the small part of him that can't believe she's actually dead and he's going to go upstairs and ask her face-to-face so that on that dreadful day when she dies from old age surrounded by loved ones someone will _know._

"Did she have a family?"

Eve spreads her hands and looks on the verge of crying again. "Bond implied something, maybe. He's refusing to leave her side." She shakes her head in the way that doesn't mean anything. "If you go up... Maybe you can find them."

He's never been good at reading people, but when he walks past her he touches her shoulder briefly with one hand and pretends he can't feel her shaking. "I'm good at finding things."

*  
He's good, but he's not a miracle worker and 72 hours of mainlining coffee and setting constant five minute alarms on his phone to catch him every time he almost drifts off to sleep later he is forced to admit that maybe – just maybe – MI6 have built a cover he can't break.

It turns out there were quite a lot of paper records what with M joining the secret service before the invention of the internet. Eve explains to him in hushed tones about the boxes upon boxes of official paperwork that M requisitioned years before and kept completely hidden and secure in a wall safe in her office in the MI6 headquarters. The reams and reams of paperwork would have told them everything there could ever be to know about M's life history – the only problem being that the office exploded and the records were now nothing more than ash floating down the river Thames.

"Maybe we could put up posters," he says as he breaks through another ten of the world's most secure firewalls only to find that – once again – they contain no personal details at all. "'Do You Know This Woman,' that kind of thing."

Eve looks over his shoulder. "Are you really expecting to find something from the first world war RAF enlistment records? She couldn't have joined the RAF until 1948."

He looks back at the list of names he's been staring at for the past hour and – oh yeah – they're all masculine names. "Oh," he says, and there's probably more to say and there's a hundred more random lists of names he could be hacking into, but his eyelids are having trouble staying open for more than a couple of seconds at a time.

Eve touches his shoulder lightly. "Do you think you should go home and sleep?"

No. No he should definitely not do that. That leads to nightmares with flashes of blond hair and maniacal laughter and all his lovely blue interfaces flashing red to tell him that he just blew up half of England. "I think we should get drunk."

*

There's no alcohol at Q's house just box after box of Earl Grey so they go to Eve's and somehow it becomes a company outing. Mallory mutters something about not drinking because he's responsible for the blah-blah-blah, Tanner breaks out all the wine in Eve's stash and offers to make cocktails, which seems to involve filling a glass with wine and then adding vodka. Bond asks for a martini – shaken, not stirred – and gets Rosé with brandy and an olive. He doesn't seem to notice anything wrong with it, but then Q is pretty sure Bond has been drunk for the last 72 hours.

By midnight Mallory has been called away to deal with some national security measure or something (okay so he got a call to tell him someone had hacked into some very secure government files and Q hid behind a pillow so no one would suspect it was him), Tanner is lying on the kitchen table mumbling something about a firefight being the way M would have wanted to go which as far as Q can tell is stupid because she didn't _want_ to go at all. Bond went outside and they're all pretending not to jump every time there's a gun shot. He's probably shooting birds, anyway; there are lots of birds in London this time of year.

Q is sitting with Eve at the kitchen table nursing a glass which is maybe a 50/50 mix of vodka and wine and spilling a little more with every bang. "They told me I couldn't even think of myself by my name anymore," he says, more to the drink than the girl. "They said – and it's the first thing you lose, you know. They own your life and suddenly your name isn't on anything it's just Q, Q, Q and it's just a letter or a thing people hate. Add four more letters and it still sounds the same, that's not a name."

"Keeps your family safe," Eve mumbles, swishing her glass of 50/50 vodka and more vodka from side to side. "Like Batman. That's the point, I think."

Q frowns down at his hand then downs the rest of the glass, the vodka burning down his throat. "Don't have a family," he says. "But then, neither did Batman."

*  
In the end they write 'M' on her gravestone. It looks sparse, too much grey and not enough ornate gold lettering in spite of the number of ridiculous quotes the Prime Minister tried to convince them to engrave. In the end it was Bond who stormed into the planning meeting and threatened to shoot everyone if they wrote 'any of that bloody motivational bullshit' on it.

("She got the job done," Bond said. "While you were all talking and politicking and filling out _paperwork_ she was in that office getting the job _done_."

He stormed out and Q followed and they spent a good five hours getting drunk on the Prime Minister's bourbon.)

In the end, that's what they write on her headstone. _She got the job done_. Q stands beside the grave in his black cardigan and black converses listening to someone give a long speech about responsibilities and dedication to the country and wishes he looked as good as Bond in a tux.

So they write 'M' on her headstone and it gets super-awkward in the office after that and everyone just keeps calling Mallory Mallory in spite of the thirty-odd memos that come out from higher up reminding them of the importance of _secrecy_ and _discretion_ and _what is the point of having code names if you're all just going to ignore them goddamnit_.

It's just too weird though because Mallory is M but he's not M.

*

Q tells Eve his name three weeks later over six bottles of wine and some scotch older than they are. Bond sobered up for the five minutes necessary to pass a breathalyser and get sent back out on mission, Mallory is meeting with the Prime Minister and Tanner quit the agency, muttering something about wanting to have a life for a little while. Q doesn't blame him in the slightest, but also doesn't quit because where else can he hack into NASA's private satellite feeds in order to watch his pizza leaving Dominoes and travelling to his house in real time without being arrested.

Okay so maybe he would be arrested if anyone knew, but he also gets to hack the CIA and write viruses that make MI6's new headquarters impossible to find on any mapping software. It beats working in a call centre, anyway, and if his lease and his credit card are both listed under a letter rather than a name, well... there's always a price to pay.

He's not at all sure Eve remembers his name in the morning but he doesn't know if he can make himself tell her again – he's started _thinking_ of himself as Q, like it's a nickname a friend made up rather than the first letter of his job title – so...

And everyone knows that Eve's name is Eve Moneypenny. It even says it on a little placard at the front of the desk where she moved to because she was tired of shooting agents in the field.

(That's unfair. Everyone says she was a wonderful field agent and they're having trouble finding her equal – although from Q's perspective, she's equally as wonderful at getting Starbucks to slip extra cinnamon in his latte when she picks it up for him on the mornings he didn't leave the office, so he's actually in favour of her having a desk job.)

But everyone knows now that her name is Moneypenny which means that Q is the only person who knows that actually it isn't. He starts compiling a list – at the back of his mind because so far no one has managed to hack the human brain, though he is working on a program for that – of the names of everyone in the office, just in case. He hacks electoral roles and birth records and the membership of the local swim team (he maybe also goes down there to make sure that it is cute-guy-from-Conventional-Weapons and that he does look great with his shirt off).

The point is next time there's a funeral – he's not so naive to think that there won't be a next time – he's going to be _ready_ and _prepared._ There will be no more graves marked by letters of the alphabet while he is Quartermaster, goddammit.

Eve reaches out to pat his hand and he realises belatedly that he's knocked a glass of wine over and also said most of that out loud. He should probably stop getting blindingly drunk so often. "You know it's not your fault we couldn't find her. It was just the Government's paranoia, her dedication and a whole heap of bad luck. You know that, right?"

Q nods vaguely, pulls his hand away from her patting and stands up to find some kitchen roll and salt for the tablecloth. She's right that he's not sure what else he could have done, but he can't think of anyone else to blame so it's easier to blame himself. He was the one who took the bait that lead to the dangerous criminal escaping in the first place, so...

Eve hugs him from behind. "You really can't control your mouth when you're drunk," she says and she's been refusing to sleep with Bond but she sleeps with him which is nice.

Q probably wouldn't refuse to sleep with Bond but he doesn't think Bond swings that way and also Q wouldn't refuse to sleep with most people, really. He just flirts with everyone until he gets lucky.

He thinks about Bond maybe implying M had kids and then if M had a husband and if any of those potential-but-impossible-to-find family members even know she's dead.

He thinks and thinks and he can't stop thinking, which is part of the problem.

*

They kiss goodbye in the morning but mostly agree it was just a drunken-fling and Q goes back to sitting on her desk with Wagamamas at lunch time and stealing her pens to tinker them into something super-impressive then bringing them back so she can roll her eyes and say "I don't actually need a pen that projects the current planetary alignment onto any flat surface."

"What do you need?" he asks, picking up a ruler that could easily conceal a knife or three.

She pulls it out of his hand. "I need a pen that writes in ink and a ruler that draws straight lines. Go bring down a ring of cyber terrorists halfway across the world or something."

Q pouts and is just sliding off the desk to go save the world (again) when the door opens and a tall blond man who seems to be ninety percent muscle leans in. He looks much too innocent to be an agent and he's holding an old manila file from back when dinosaurs lived and manila files were a thing. 

"Um," he says, looking at the neat and tidy reception desk, the perfectly dressed and beautiful receptionist and the can't-seem-to-finish-puberty boy wearing a cardigan and skinny jeans sitting on top of the phone with a mouthful of noodles. "I'm looking for MI6?"

Really, he should have to look a whole lot harder and moving _back into their old building_ was probably the worst thing that they could ever have done. Q had bitched about it for a week and then written a program that meant all the new employees trying to get there via sat-nav ended up being directed into the Thames. They got an angry memo about that too.

Eve pushes at the back of his belt, just missing the button which turns it into a lifejacket – he lives in a city with a river and he can't swim, it doesn't hurt to be cautious – and he stumbles off the desk onto the floor. He brushes off the cardigan he's been wearing for about three days and tries to look professional. He's not very good at it. He should probably be wearing his glasses, they occasionally help.

"Can I ask if you have an appointment?" Eve asks, pulling out her killer charming-smile like she can polite this stranger into forgetting that Q is even in the room. Eve is the only person he knows that can pull off polite as a verb, but she does it flawlessly.

"No. No, I –" he glances sideways at Q again then looks down at the manila folder. "I'm looking for Peggy Carter. The last records I have say she was transferred here."

Eve's polite smile turns into a polite frown. "We don't have anyone employed with that name," she says because her mental Rolodex is both more complete than Q's and has names for each employee rather than 'Hot boy from CW' and 'That Girl with the Perm'. "I'm sorry, perhaps she's moved to a different office."

"Are you sure?" he hesitates, then holds the folder out to her like that might help. "She lived in America for a while, helped found the SSR and then SHIELD before coming back here during the cold war. I just – I used to know her and I was hoping maybe –"

Eve isn't reaching out and the man is shaking his file a little which is a waste of time except that something catches the light and makes Q jolt. "Can I see that?"

Eve's frown gets a little less polite and a little more confused as Q half grabs the file from the man's hand. There's a picture inside of a young woman with brown hair and bright red lipstick and she doesn't look exactly _familiar_ so he's almost convinced that he's wrong until he looks at the name.

_Margaret "Peggy" Carter._

He turns his head to Eve. "Bond said M talked about the cold war."

Eve stares back at him for a moment, her mouth falling slightly open, then snatches the file from his hand to flick through the few sheets of paper. "You don't think?" she turns her head to the man. "And they told you to come here? To this office?" She flicks open a page to read over an address, her hands trembling so hard the pages are knocking together. "Who are you? How did you know her?"

The man rubs the back of his neck a little uncomfortably even though it's a valid question because M was ancient and this guy can't be any older than them. "I'm Steve Rogers," he says eventually. "And that's a long story."

*

Q has never been good at visiting graves. His parents were buried too far from where he's ended up and he never really understood why he would want to leave flowers next to some names that don't match up to anything in his head. He's not sure if you're supposed to wear black again when you're just visiting so he's pulled on a slightly darker pair of jeans and dug his black converses out again, just in case.

He was probably supposed to bring flowers, but he didn't think on the way over and it's the middle of winter so there's nothing in the flowerbeds or on the bushes around the small plot. He digs around in his pockets and finds Eve's planetary alignment pen. It's late enough that when he clicks it the small circle of planets is visible, distorted and uneven in the grass.

There wasn't enough evidence to get the headstone changed. Rogers' story is a little too fantastic for the suits up in the Government and there have been enough Margaret Carters in the secret service over the decades that no one can be sure Steve's Peggy is their M.

"It's what you choose to believe," Eve had said, and it turns out Q is okay with that. He's the last person who would be because he likes _facts_ and _numbers_ but M being friends with Captain America fits in his head the same way it fits that light is both a wave and a particle and he can do maths with imaginary numbers.

It's not so hard to believe that a woman who chose to blow a heavily funded government program on a short skinny boy because of his heart would visit a prison cell and hire a convicted felon when no one else would. It's not hard to believe she would keep putting her faith in an agent who regards rules as guidelines and can't take an accurate shot in a target range.

He shines the pen up over the headstone, Jupiter sitting neatly at the centre of the M and Mars settled further down, over the single line of text.

_She got the job done._

("In the end," she said to him, back in that jail cell with a man in a black suit tapping his shoulder holster pointedly in the direction of the stupid hipster in an orange jumpsuit, like he might leap up and choke her with the cuffs holding his wrists together. "The job becomes who you are." She touches his chest with one finger. "You remember your name, you hide it in here and you take it to your grave. Do you understand?")

He said yes at the time, but he didn't. He thinks he might now.

He sighs softly, opening his hand and letting the pen drop into the grass at the bottom of the stone. "Goodbye, M."

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: The idea for the Avengers crossover element has been floating around tumblr, so I lay no claim to the original idea. Neither Skyfall, Avengers or the British Government belong to me.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] You may have my number, you can take my name](https://archiveofourown.org/works/647673) by [greedy_dancer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greedy_dancer/pseuds/greedy_dancer)




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